WordPress Posts, Comments, Pages and Categories Explained

WordPress Posts, Comments, Pages and Categories Explained

I’m not sure if you already use WordPress or if you’re simply researching WordPress but you might have seen some of these terms thrown around such as posts, comments, pages, and categories and I want to explain them to you right now.

First of all, the simplest thing to understand on a WordPress blog is what’s called a post. When you think of a blog, it’s a journal. You see that someone has posted on January 10th and they have something to say. It might be a video, it might be text but there is a list that starts from top to bottom of different journal entries. And usually, the newest one is at the top and this is very basic. It’s very simple. If you want to add new stuff to this website, just go Post, Add New, and now you have added a new journal entry anyone can read. Now if there are too many journal entries that go off the page, people can click and view older posts. Perhaps on the sidebar, they can view previous month’s content but a post is just a journal entry.

Now when you have this journal entry or post, you can allow others not to edit it but to add their additional comments underneath. And what’s cool about WordPress is you can choose to either not allow comments, allow comments or allow comments but moderate them and choose which ones actually get shown to the public. So underneath that every single blog post, someone can click on the actual blog post and type in their name, their email address and their website address and say their additional comments.

For example, if you had a new journal entry or blog post about different kinds of sail boats or if you preferred motor boats to sail boats and someone had a comment saying, “Well, I know that you prefer motor boats to sail boats but I prefer sail boats for this reason and this reason.” And then you can respond back to them in an additional comment. They responded as well. Comments are a discussion that happens underneath a post. So that’s very basic, posts and comments under a post.

But you can also have pages in the blog. Now let’s say that you have this journal and you posted every week or so. But someone wanted to know what was this blog all about. You would have what’s called an About page. And usually this is a link at the top and someone could click on this and they get to this page which is not really a weekly update. It’s just part of the site. It’s part of the site’s navigation.

You would also think, “I want to have a way for someone to contact me privately.” You might add a contact page and this would be another link at the top so you would have these pages that are listed left to right at the top of your WordPress blog. These are pages. Now you can set this up where someone can leave comments under a page. So for example, if you have your About page and someone wants to say, “I like what you’re all about. Congratulations, you did great.” They can leave a comment or you can close comments on pages as well.

A very important distinction, there are posts which are your journal entries that go from top to bottom. There are your pages which are your navigation which have no date, which go from left to right at the top. And you can have comments on either one or none at all.

And the final thing I want to help you out with is this idea of categories because you will probably only have a few pages but you might have many posts, maybe even hundreds of posts over a course of time. And to make it easier to find, you might want to categorize these posts and you might want to say, “Well, this post belongs in the sail boat category.” So if someone wants to see all of the times you’re talking about sail boats as opposed to other kinds of boats then click on the sail boats category and find just those posts talking about sail boats. If they want to find other times they’re talking about motor boats then click on the motor boats category and see all those posts.

But here’s the cool thing is that a post can belong to many categories. So you can say this post discusses sail boats and motor boats and when someone clicks on the motor boats category, they can see all the times you mentioned that. They’re very important. Pages do not belong to categories. Categories belong to posts only.

Just to recap, a blog has posts and pages. Comments can belong on a post or on a page but a post can belong to a category, many categories in fact, but that it is. I hope that clears up a few things. Now you have your blog and your blog will contain several categories. The categories will contain posts. The posts will have comments and off to the side, you will also have pages or navigation such as the About page or Contact page on your WordPress blog.

And the best way to figure all this out is just install WordPress on your own, mess around and see what happens.